Most chief executives claw their way to the top; some parachute there; a few inherit the top job. But last week saw what was perhaps a more intriguing case: a former student radical who until recently was a medium-ranking boffin in a medium-ranking company, and who now finds himself, thanks to a demerger and a merger, about to run one of the largest companies of its kind in the world.
He is Dr Tom McKillop, the 55-year-old Scottish chemist and chief executive designate of AstraZeneca, the company put together by merger last week which will become, by some measures, the world's third-largest pharmaceuticals maker.
Dr McKillop's journey to the top of AstraZeneca began 30 years ago when he nipped into a Glasgow pub for a quick pint. Returning from studies in Paris with his head full of the 1968 uprising, he was about to embark on a life in academia.
He had won a teaching fellowship at Glasgow University where he was to lecture in theoretical chemistry. Recently married, he was awaiting the arrival of his first child. He had never given a thought to joining what he called the "fuddy-duddies" running industry.
In the pub he got chatting to Peter Doyle, like Dr McKillop also a graduate of Glasgow University. Mr Doyle was a signed-up fuddy-duddy. He had joined ICI a few years earlier and thought the British chemicals company would be keen to take on a man of Dr McKillop's gifts (he had graduated in chemistry with the highest marks in his year).
Dr McKillop was initially unimpressed. "And then Peter said: `Only a fool could begin a career without considering the alternatives.' That was so compellingly logical, it was the end of the discussion."
Dr McKillop duly presented himself for interviews at ICI's Runcorn site and was sufficiently bowled over by the discussions that he joined the company on the spot.
He was like an impulsive young man signing up for the army. "On the plane going back to Paris I had to figure out how on earth to tell my wife," he recalls. "We had bought a house in Glasgow and everything. My wife married someone she expected to stay an academic, having students round for stew, that kind of thing. She sometimes reminds me of the lack of consultation," he says with studied understatement.
Now his life is to change dramatically again. Only a few years ago he was technical director of ICI Pharmaceuticals, an important job, but some way off the rarefied air he is about to breathe. When Zeneca was spun off as a standalone pharmaceuticals company in 1993, he helped ensure that the child outstripped its corporate parent by pushing a series of new drugs through research and development.
Is he equipped to oversee its next phase? Zeneca is British, Astra is Swedish - and cross-border mergers are notoriously messy. He will be required to balance the market's desire for rigorous cost-cutting with the need to build a new corporate entity. One long-time Zeneca watcher is unsure that Dr McKillop is up to the task. "He has not had a great deal of experience at rationalising and cost-cutting. He has been managing growth at Zeneca, which demands a totally different set of skills."
Dr McKillop believes there is no need for a hatchet-man. The merger of Astra and Zeneca, he says, will be nothing like that previous giant British drugs merger - Glaxo's aggressive takeover of Wellcome three years ago, a process from which the wounds have still not entirely healed.
But why the need to merge at all? Zeneca fiercely guarded its independence under the leadership of Sir David Barnes, whose silky style is in contrast to Dr McKillop's down-to-earth manner ("I'm not a yacht on the Mediterranean type"). The trouble is, analysts suggest, that after launching seven drugs in the past three years, Zeneca's pipeline has run dry. When those products, some of them in new therapeutic areas for Zeneca, did not do as well as hoped, the company was forced to look for a partner.
Some have even blamed Dr McKillop for the predicament, since he oversaw the disappointing drug launches.
"This merger is not driven by necessity," he insists. "We believe and we have always believed that we have terrific prospects on our own. We are doing this because we are convinced that this [merger] is better than going it alone."
Two forces are driving consolidation in what is still a fragmented industry, he believes. One is the ever-escalating cost of coming up with new drugs as the revolution in genetics and molecular biology forces pharmaceutical companies to delve deeply - and expensively - into the workings of the human body. The other is the cost of marketing, particularly with the advent of direct-to-consumer television advertising in the US. More and more spending in both areas is leaving the smaller drugs companies trailing.
These pressures are real, agree analysts. But if Astra brings with it the benefit of scale, it also comes with liabilities. Most important is the imminent patent expiry of Losec, an antiulcer agent and the biggest money-spinner in the history of the drugs industry. If Astra cannot extend its patent on Losec beyond 2001, earnings will plummet. And the Swedish company does not have another blockbuster up its sleeve.
Sceptics say that, rather than filling Zeneca's empty-seeming pipeline, Astra may serve only to compound the problem.
Dr McKillop is convinced such criticisms are unfounded and that the two companies are a perfect fit. He thinks back to his time as a student in France in 1968, when, in his opinion, those in charge had not moved quickly enough. The art of good management, he says, is to anticipate the difficulties and to react to a changing environment.
Good companies, he says, live permanently on a "creative edge of chaos". His conversion to management speak - even if the phrase is borrowed from his early days as a pure mathematician - suggests his journey from student radical to corporate fuddy-duddy may be complete.
